Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials [Formato Kindle]

After completing the entire book and going through the exercises I can safely say this book delivers on its promise: you will have a working game and get the basic concepts behind its construction from using the unity engine.

Now before you buy this book realize what it is NOT:
-It is not a C# or Java language book (there are many books on those)
-It is not about game design
-It is not about about modelling, texturing, or animating
-It is not a book on programming (like teaching object oriented coding)

What is this book?
-An introduction to the core features of unity (GUI, textures, assets, prefabs, particle systems, lighting, very basic animation, menus, terrain editor)
-An introduction to basic coding (and an introduction to some concepts of object oriented coding)
-An introduction to scripting using C# & Java
-A detailed step by step break down of how to make a basic adventure game on an island
-A book which gives you pre-made assets (sounds, textures, models, materials) and shows you how to work with them to create a game

This book breaks down step by step (from importing models and using textures to writing and tweaking scripts) how to create a world using the unity terrain editor and asset importer. It then walks you through how to make the player interact with objects, and create effects and triggers, detect collisions, call animations, and provide player feedback.

Coding can be intimidating but this book really keeps it simple (with few exceptions) as it explains every thing you're doing as you do it. I found it very easy to follow along with the book and my builds would come out just fine each time (and if it didn't the errors were almost always spelling mistakes).

This book will serve as a great launching pad for learning unity. If you are a programmer this is a great intro to unity. If you are new to programming, you might want to read a book on objected oriented coding before or after this book (but this book can be done by someone with 0 coding experience). If you are an artist this will definitely help you learn how to use unity and get used to the asset import options you have available.

Hope this helps

P.S. This book was written for unity 3.4 (at the time of this review the current version is 3.5.1). The particle system in the book (chapter 8) is out of date. If you go to his website, [...], he has a video which explains the new particle system (it's very easy to use).

As part of a SMALL indie project we decided to go with Unity do to it's great community and portability to so many platforms.

I needed a book that would get me up to being able to start prototyping ideas quickly. This is that book! Having the code for both JavaScript and C# available side by side made for a great learning tool as well. We have decided as a team to go with C# and few books on the market are geared towards that language. Even the Publishers Errata page was mostly regarding issues and solutions with the JavaScript code.

That is not to say there were no issues with the C# code, just not many readers had posted much by the time I went through the book. Why didn't I?!? Well as a neophyte in C# I felt I was unqualified to determine if the issue was really the code or my understand and accidental typing.

There was one bit of Errata that I submitted, but as of today (3 weeks later) the publishers have not added to their Errata page, and that had to do with a error in the C# code of one of the projects, in the Kindle format. The code had in this one script had a line and a half missing and the half line was concatenated onto the end of the previous line. making for a very confusing bit of code. This is where having both the JavaScript and C# code available throughout the book was very nice. I was able to translate the JavaScript code to the appropriate C# replacement and was good to go.

My one true complaint is that the author purposely left errors in a few places as learning tools for later in the chapter. This was distracting as I noticed the logic or errors as I was typing them in, and went about troubleshooting and being frustrated in the "error" un-necessarily. I would ask that in the future that there be a warning that the issues was there and either an invitation to figure it out or a note that the solution was forthcoming after the lesson attached was learned.

I am 83% (kindle "pages") through this book and I can no longer resist writing a review. I have purchased several books on Unity and found them disappointing because I spent so much time and energy troubleshooting errors in the text or distilling meaning from the sloppy writing that I was distracted from my mission to learn. Clearly, while these books have "reviewers" nobody worked through the tutorials and rooted out the errors. Such is not the case with Goldstone's book. His explanations are clear and easy to understand and his tutorials are rock solid.

I encourage you to buy this book and get to work learning Unity. You won't be disappointed.